TRAVEL: Sexual diversity by Christian Vollmert

Travelling the world is a wonderful thing. It teaches you a lot of lessons for life. You travel from one place to another and you always meet new people everywhere you go. You experience all kind of different cultures and habits in different countries that are completely normal for local people. For oneself it might be a little awkward sometimes, but you quickly start to realize that the best thing you can possibly do, is to open up to anyone you meet. Obviously not every person is a good person, so you always have to watch out a little, but generally you can claim: People are great!

Doesn’t matter how they look like, how tall they are, what size they have, what job they do, where they come from, what backround they have, what passions/ dreams they have and also what kind of sexuality they have.

The last point is actually a pretty important one for many people, because it defines a lot of who you are as a person, how you behave, what kind of people you surround yourself with and how others see you. It is a big factor for ones life.

Society, doesn’t matter where you go in this world, is still a little bit of racist and discriminating when it comes to sexual diversity. Unfortunately that’s just how it is. But when you travel the world, all that doesn’t matter. There is no difference, as a person, between a straight man/ woman or a gay man/woman. Travelling just widens your horizon and changes the perspective on a lot of conflicting topics.

It’s easy to see, if you take into consideration how every country different attributes, but is, in core, just pretty much completely equal (same for humans), that every person on planet earth should have the right to do whatever they want to do regarding their sexuality. During my travels I met a lot of gay people, men and women, who have been absolutely fantastic human beings. Most of them are honest, smart, take care of themselves, endearing and definitely open minded as well as fun to hang out with!

Sexual diversity in different countries

How countries and people handle sexual diversity is very very different. It’s pretty much the same with races. To give you an example:

When I travelled Australia I lived in Melbourne for a while. I found a flat share in the city centre and my landlady was Chinese. When I moved in I met her husband, while signing the lease and the first thing he said, after he asked me where I am from, was „You are a Nazi“. He was dead serious. No joking at all. That experience was shocking for me. It also made me really angry and I thought a lot about it. It just showed me that many people in this world are very ignorant when it comes to sensible topics. I could guarantee, that he would have said something discriminating, if I would have
told him that I would be gay, which I am not. It would have been the same thing.

Back home in Germany most people are completely different when it comes to sexual diversity. Of course you find some contrary people everywhere, but in general people are very open minded about it. If someone is gay, most of my fellow countrymen don’t have a problem with it. You just let people be how they want to be. Noone really has a problem with it. But if they do, many people don’t say it anyway. Why?

Because if someone says something inappropriate or discriminating to a gay person, he/ she would probably have a social problem, because other people would start to argue and tell them to stop badmouthing.

I would assume that the whole topic of sexual diversity is definitely linked to the standard of education in different countries. In Germany we have a good education system and we are big on human rights and equality. So I think that sexual diversity will continuously be socially accepted in the future and the freedom of sexuality will be as normal and accepted as the right of free speach.

Worldwide sexual diversity in the future

Through traveling the world I did not only see the different levels of acceptance for sexual diversity in various countries, but also how it might play out in the future. It really depends on what country you look at, how developed it is as a whole, what kind of culture people have a certain country, how they have been raised, who is in charge politically and how the overall perception of sexual diversity really is.

As a rule I would say: The more developed and modern a country is, the more sexual diversity is accepted.

But, if you take Russia as an example, you quickly see that there are exceptions to the rule. Russia is a highly developed country and a global power. Still sexual diversity is being suppressed extremly in this country. Many people have to go to jail, if the go public about their „unnormal“ sexuality or they get physically abused for it by others. That’s a daily fare. In my opinion this is crazy and those kind of conditions need to be changed!

In general I think there is still a lot of work to do in our world, but I am positive about the future. I think that future generations will be way more open minded and aware than humanity already is nowadays. Mainly because of globalization and the power of Social Media. Eventually most people on planet earth will accept sexual diversity and it will be as normal as brushing your teeth every day.